Facebook makes pregnancy envy really, really easy

While Facebook has always been the perfect medium for the not-so-subtle to brag about that new house or a Caribbean vacation, a recent article in the Washington Post points to a very sad but real trend for those who use the site: the intensification of pregnancy envy.

That's right, pregnancy envy, that pretty normal, human response to seeing the whole world pop out kids, for whatever reason, you remain childless. While there's nothing new about that feeling, the proliferation of Facebook "friends" and the frequency of their updates has left some infertile couples with a lot more of it. And while none of the people interviewed for the article thought their friends should change their behavior, they did say that watching people get what you want, day after day, year after year, can be pretty sucky. Or as Elizabeth Rivers, a 39-year-old-woman woman who has spent $80,000 trying to conceive for the last four years, describes seeing her cousin's posted sonogram:"I felt like I got punched in the gut. You want to be happy for people, but you take it personally. I was like, 'Why the hell does [my cousin] have a sonogram for her profile picture?' I called my mother and she said, 'Oh, we were wondering how we were going to tell you.' You feel like people are pitying you and they are avoiding telling you things. When they do that, it makes it that much harder."

While it's easy to point the finger at a passage like this and either blame the hurt person or assume she's feeling a little too sorry for herself, the truth is that jealousy can turn the most rational person into someone they'd rather not be. That's its power.

At this point, infertile couples needing to protect their own feelings have a few choices about what they can do: They can ignore the posts entirely (one woman fessed up to blocking people's updates as soon as she found out they were expecting), they can grow skin thick enough to absorb any potential pain (I'm thinking something between a scuba shirt and a HAZ-MAT suit), or they can log off the system entirely.

What about you? Have you ever had Facebook-induced pregnancy envy? What's the best way you've found to deal with it?